"Middle class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in constant progress during her passage from childhood to womanhood. The great book of human nature was turned over before her. Her father's social position was very peculiar. He belonged in fortune and station to the middle class. His daughters seem to have been suffered to mix freely with those whom butlers and waiting-maids call vulgar. We are told that they were in the habit of playing with the children of a wig-maker who lived in the adjoining house. Yet few nobles could assemble in the most stately mansions ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... must bear in mind two things. First, the necessity for the life of the country going on as if nothing had happened. It is true that many thousands of our working men and women have emigrated and thousands of our upper and middle class too; they were the people who were not tied down by business, or who could afford to cut those ties. But those represent comparatively a few out of the many. The great businesses and the small businesses must go on, people must be fed and clothed and housed and medically ...
— When William Came • Saki
... anything. But neither did any one of the few lads whose fathers were peasants, or who belonged to the lower ranks, stand at the head of his class. They were very diligent, but success rarely corresponded with the amount of labour employed. The well-educated but by no means wealthy middle class supplied the school with its ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the welfare of the peasantry and the middle class, striving to crush the power of the nobles whose hands were perpetually raised one against the other. Therefore he intrusted affairs of State to men of inferior rank, and determined that he would form ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... state is entirely modern. It has been developed with the development of the middle class, and with the growth of a commercial and industrial civilization. Horror at human slavery is not a century old as a common sentiment in a civilized state. The idea of the "free man," as we understand it, is ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... not a misanthrope or a woman hater, as you know, yet from what I gather I fear that, in the upper middle class at least, it is the women who are responsible for this increased formality that most men naturally would avoid. Led by personal ambition, or that of young daughters, they seek to maintain a standard just ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of the deserted Forum of Trajan was dull suggested itself to him as a Roman, knowing the predilection of Roman women of the middle class for looking ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to the position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude. As the merchant middle class, the Jews were protected and advanced by the kings and the Szlachta. The consequent security of their position induced so rapid a growth of the Jewish element that in a little while the Jews of Poland outnumbered those of the old Jewish settlements in Occidental Europe. The numerous ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... author of "Sandford and Merton," have fallen; namely, that of addressing their instruction to women of the upper classes. But she intends, while including all ranks of society, to give particular attention to the middle class, who appear to her to be in a more natural state. Then, warning her sex that she will treat them like rational creatures, and not as beings doomed to perpetual childhood, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Elsie came whirling by, Cissy unnecessarily large and bare, and Elsie intolerably pert and middle class, Morton regretted that he would have to ask them to dance. And, when he had danced with them and the three young ladies Madame Delacour had introduced him to, and had taken a comtesse into supper, he found that the fourteenth waltz was over. But Mildred bade him not to look so depressed, she had ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... and must resist the power of the Government which has chosen to flout public opinion. Nor may we receive instruction from schools controlled by Government and aided by it. Emptying of the schools will constitute a demonstration of the will of the middle class of India. It is far better for the nation even to neglect the literary instruction of the children than to co-operate with a Government that has striven to maintain an injustice and untruth on the Khilafat and Punjab matters. Similarly have I ventured to suggest ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... who managed, in 1866, to wreck Lord John Russell's Reform Bill in the House. But Bright had his revenge in the country. Such meetings as ensued in the great provincial towns had not been seen for twenty years: the middle class and the artisans were fused as in the great Repeal struggle of 1846. At Glasgow as many as 150,000 men paraded outside the town, and no hall could contain the thousands who wished to hear the great Tribune. He claimed that eighty-four per cent. of his countrymen were ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... hill-tops. As these nobles were become increasingly troublesome, it is not surprising that P[vr]emysl rulers induced more and more Germans to settle in the cities of Bohemia and Moravia, thus starting a steady-going middle class which might be expected to pay for peace and protection and which when walled in was conveniently in hand for the tax-collector's operations. That this scheme was beginning to succeed even in the early days of the twelfth century ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... need scarcely look further than to the high quality of the addresses which their great orators deemed best calculated to act with effect on their understanding and will. A benefit of the same kind, though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to serve parish offices, which, though it does not occur to so many, nor is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... a direct effect of the teachings of Treitschke can hardly be doubted, when we recall the great influence his teachings have had, and the peculiar bitterness of that dramatic personage for England, for England's pretentiousness, her middle class satisfaction, her insular conceit. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... with Wesley's party, must be regarded as one of the leaders of the movement; its influence on the labouring class, specially in large towns and in the mining districts, was strong, and it gained a considerable hold on people of the middle class. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... whose head had been bent while his wife was talking, looked up, and there was a half smile of mischievous humour on his face. In the upper as well as the lower middle class there is a certain maternal love capable of rising to the height of passion and of sinking to mere idolatry. There are mothers who in their affection and love will fall down and worship their son. Theirs is not that maternal love which veils its own weaknesses, which defends its rights, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Greek cities there was no middle class. In this regard Athens with its thirteen thousand small proprietors ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... ecclesiastical reform was only possible by the removal of some of the most influential heads of the aristocracy, which, however, did not succumb as completely as in Zurich, so that even the friends of the Reformation and of Zwingli, who form the middle class, worked their way into the government, accepted partly from necessity and partly of their own accord, aristocratic forms and principles. The closer the connection between Bern and Zurich now became, ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... as to the United States Senate being a "millionaires' club" has become antiquated; much more appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... McKinstry. An over-full house, with an unordered, slipshod life, hungry, clinging desperately in its poverty to an old prestige of rank, one worker inside patiently bearing the whole selfish burden. Well, there was the history of the anxious, struggling, middle class of America: why need he have been goaded so intolerably by this instance? Paul's eyes were jaundiced; he sat moodily watching the lighted window off in the darkness, through which he could catch glimpses of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of the younger Romans, Pontius Cominius, of the middle class of citizens, but with an honourable ambition to distinguish himself, undertook the adventure. He would not take any writing to the garrison, for fear that if he were taken the enemy might discover Camillus's plans. He dressed ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... one of his ambitions to put an end to class warfare in Germany. To this end he begins, with his usual tact, by denouncing the capitalists (that is to say; the wealth of the middle class) to the workers, and then holds up the scandalous luxury of the aristocracy in the army to the ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The middle class have a philosophy with which they protect themselves against the insidious suggestions that come from the life of the conspicuous rich. These, on the other hand, half expecting that simplicity and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... revolutionaries speedily renewed their efforts against the chief officials who were told off to crush them; but it soon became clear that they had lost the good-will of the middle class. The Liberals looked on them, not merely as the murderers of the liberating Czar, but as the destroyers of the nascent constitution; and the masses looked on unmoved while five of the accomplices in the outrage ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... peaceful like the others, observed this joy, this smiling depression of these people of the middle class, and in her heart there was savage laughter; all her being jeered, but her face maintained its frigid rigidity. Ah! how she deceived these worthy people, and how delighted she was to deceive them with such triumphant impudence. Her sweetheart, at ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... the cathedral, as befitting the distinguished ecclesiastics or nobility who were assigned to him.'' The cellarer's buildings were near the west end of the nave, in which ordinary visitors of the middle class were hospitably entertained. The inferior pilgrims and paupers were relegated to the north hall or almonry, just within the gate, as far as possible from the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Persius, for Scipio, and for Rutilius, persons eminent for their science, but for the Tarentines, the Consentines, and the Sicilians. Montaigne has complained that he found his readers too learned, or too ignorant, and that he could only please a middle class, who have just learning enough to comprehend him. Congreve says, "there is in true beauty something which vulgar souls cannot admire." Balzac complains bitterly of readers,—"A period," he cries, "shall have cost us the labour of a day; we shall have distilled into an essay the essence of our ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... they have hurled abuse at the throne, at the whole Old Order of things. And now, when they see to what chaos things are coming, when they wish to stop at moderation, at order, at a monarchy based on solid principles and supported by the solid middle class, they are suddenly made to realize how little their theories correspond with their real desires. Incapacity, misrule, is everywhere. Narbonne has been made War Minister! At this crisis, when the allied armies are gathering on the frontier, when war is imminent against two hundred and fifty ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... pretend to the practical experience of a real politician, but my uncle talks to me a great deal, and to me the truth seemed so clear. It is the advanced Unionists who need you. They are really the party from whom progress must come, because it is the middle class which has to be attacked, and it is amongst the middle classes that Liberalism has its stronghold. If you once took your place among the Labour Members, you would be a Labour Member and nothing else. People wouldn't ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... composed of Republicans terrified out of their wits at each other. The moderate men, mimics of the Girondins, with the Reds and the Socialists and the Communists, ready to tear them to pieces. And then—What then?—the commercialists, the agriculturists, the middle class combining to elect some dictator who will cannonade the mob and become a mimic Napoleon, grafted on a mimic Necker or a mimic Danton. Oh, Messieurs, I am French to the core. You inheritors of such names must be as French as I ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it was easy to see as she 'd really took it a good deal to heart bein' thirded for sixteen miles; but Gran'ma Mullins went right on with when she lived in Meadville 'n' taught school that winter she was seventeen. She said as Rufus was in her middle class that winter 'n' mos' superior. He was nine 'n' the oldest o' nine, there bein' two pairs o' twins; she said it looked like Tabitha 'n' Sammy had took the Bible about replenishin' the earth right on to their own shoulders. Gran'ma Mullins said ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... urgent need for your Majesty to take means of pacification. Thus the honor of the Crown may yet be saved. To-morrow it will be too late." The King's answer was to declare Paris under a state of siege. The so-called "Great Week," or "three days' revolution," had begun. The bourgeoisie or middle class and all the students joined the revolt. Before nightfall 600 barricades blocked the streets of Paris. Every house became a fortress. "Where do the rebels get their powder?" asked the King in astonishment. "From the soldiers," was the curt reply ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... streets of shops, it covers a great extent of ground with streets and lanes of pretty, isolated dwelling-houses, surrounded by trees, gardens, and well-trimmed hedges, each garden entered by a substantial gateway. The existence of something like a middle class with home privacy and home life is suggested by these miles of comfortable "suburban residences." Foreign influence is hardly at all felt, there is not a single foreigner in Government or any other employment, and even the hospital was organised ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... addition, the influence and prestige of the great landowners were so powerful that even in the counties, and in those boroughs where the number of electors was considerable, none but members of the ruling class sought election. So far as the members of the middle class were concerned—the merchants, master weavers, iron producers, and craftsmen,—they were strong in wealth and their wishes counted heavily with the aristocracy in all legislation of a financial or commercial nature; but of actual part in the government ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... In the middle class and the people, the ugliness is more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious; and in the women there remains a certain vagueness ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... of one man and one woman is, under all circumstances, the single form of intercourse between the sexes which is not illegitimate; and this conviction has acquired the force of a primal moral intuition."[1379] What has chiefly aided this effect has been the rise to wealth and civil power of the middle class of the later Middle Ages, in whose mores such views had become fixed without much ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... remember this passage in Culture and Anarchy—'I often, therefore, when I want to distinguish clearly the aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle class, name the former, in my own mind, the Barbarians. And when I go through the country, and see this or that beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning the landscape, "There," I say to myself, "is a great ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... tapestry hangings, Maximilian Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made against him was that he had styled ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... 1792, of the Germans against France in 1813 and in 1870, of Italy against Austria in 1859 and afterward, and of the Americans in the Civil War of 1861. There were certainly many noble characters in Russia, and these must have felt deeply the condition of things; but there being no great middle class, and the lower class having been long kept in besotted ignorance, there seemed to be no force on which ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... experience—they are wise men; and, lastly, those who learn neither from their own nor from other people's experience—they are fools. This class is by far the largest. I am content," continued Clarence, "to be in the middle class—perhaps you will say because I cannot be in the first: however, were it in my power to choose my own character, I should, forgive me the seeming vanity of the speech, still be content to remain in my present station upon this principle—the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... which has been thought and done in the world, is his panacea for all ills.... In almost all of his prose writing he attacks some form of 'Philistinism,' by which word he characterized the narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction of the British middle class. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... phrases were spun out fine, they were subtle, they seemed to cling round her and stifle her; now they were short and keen, and they cut like knives. "Women may be divided into three classes—the virtuous, the flirtuous, and the non-virtuous. The middle class is by far the largest. It shades off finely into the two extremes. Laura belonged to it." "The moon was up, and Diana, divine sportswoman, was abroad, hunting big game." "Laura had made a virtue of necessity. She said that proved the necessity ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Planterre and her daughters, bright, pretty young ladies, who seemed much attached to their parents. They gave me a very pleasant idea of a French family of the upper middle class. ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... Alec was tending to quarrel with humanity at large, and so he went the whole hog, more in search of a desperate ideal than by way of impetuous sin. Mr. WILKINSON treats the affair with deliberate, cold-blooded, even cynical analysis; and his portrayal of the snobbery and humbug of the upper-middle class, social and intellectual, in which his creatures move is searching and disturbing. But, I ask myself, are people really like that? Or rather are there enough of these unnaturals, extremists, moral Bolshevists or whatever you like to call them, to justify their presentation as a modern type? Always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity of Spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if to run against a Working Man involves a gash; if collision with an Officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere touch from the vertex of a Private ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... forgotten that I had ever been there. Notwithstanding I had been out nearly three terms, I had kept pace with my class, making one class each year, the same as if I had been in school. Upon a very critical examination, in which I averaged ninety-three for all subjects, I entered the B Middle class in the day-school. ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... journey to Hampstead, which ended so disastrously, the art of Boz is shown as usual by supplying the notion of movement—he seems to take us along up the northern heights—we feel the pleasurable anticipations of a party of pleasure for the lower middle class. From the lower end of Goswell Street—where Mr. Pickwick's lodgings must have been, for, in the upper part, there are no houses opposite for Mrs. Raddle to call at—it must have been a long drive for the party. I assume ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... his secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The maire was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, the thumb and finger-tips of one hand poised ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... force of nearly 400 million work in agriculture, which contributes 30% of the country's GDP. Production, trade, and investment reforms since 1991 have provided new opportunities for Indian businesspersons and an estimated 300 million middle class consumers. New Delhi has avoided debt rescheduling, attracted foreign investment, and revived confidence in India's economic prospects since 1991. Many of the country's fundamentals - including ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... for gentility is most prevalent amongst the upper, middle, or lower classes it is difficult to say; the priest, in the text, seems to think that it is exhibited in the most decided manner in the middle class; it is the writer's opinion, however, that in no class is it more strongly developed than in the lower; what they call being well born goes a great way amongst them, but the possession of money much farther, whence Mr. Flamson's ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... The middle class—the piccolo mondo—that shares Italian dialect with the poor are more strictly local in their manners than either the opulent or the indigent of the same city. They have moreover the busy intelligence ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... were five sisters of the wood in one of the Western departments of France (Lot-et-Garonne, I think), who all married men: two of them married two brothers. Apart they led the decorous lives of the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to see! A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas, that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a poignant one. For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses. It was ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Moses Mendelssohn's house, until the end of the eighties the only rendezvous of wits, scholars, and literary men, the preference was for magnificent banquets and noisy carousals, each rank entertaining its own members. In the middle class, the burghers, the social instinct had not awakened at all. Alexander Humboldt significantly dated his first letter to Henriette Herz from Schloss Langeweile. In the course of time the desire for spiritual sympathy led to the formation of reading clubs and conversazioni. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... unpossessed by the menial and those engaged in unskilled labor. Let it never be forgotten that as high over in importance as the best interest of the race is to that of the individual, will be the uplifting influence of assiduously cultivating a desire to obtain trades. The crying want with us is a middle class. The chief component of our race today is laborers unskilled. We will not and cannot compete with other races who have a large and influential class of artisans and mechanics, and having received higher ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... "thou"] or speak in the second person, singular or plural, but always in the third person: [thus], "The chief would like this or that." Especially a woman when addressing a man, even though they be equal and of the middle class, never say less than "Sir" or "Master," and that after every word: "When I was coming, sir, up the river, I saw, sir, etc." In writing they make constant use of very fine and delicate expressions of regard, and beauties and courtesy. Their manner of salutation when they met one ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... is dominating modern society. It began, like all movements, in literature and philosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its way into social and political and economic organizations. Now, when we are dealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class; this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in its most brutal and entrenched expressions. Here it confronts every preacher on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We are continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... too large a substratum of the real, the impassioned, the human, for our present purposes. We deal chiefly with the wilder and more rial forms of superstition; not so far off from fleshly nature as the purely allegoric—not so near as the penal, the purgatorial, the penitential. In this middle class, 'Gabriel's hounds'—the 'phantom ship'—the gloomy legends of the charcoal burners in the German forests—and the local or epichorial superstitions from every district of Europe, come forward by thousands, attesting the high activity of the miraculous and the hyperphysical ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... that the class to whom the great body of the ten-pound householders belonged—the lower middle class—was above all classes the one most hardly treated in the imposition of the taxes. A small shopkeeper, or a clerk who just, and only just, was rich enough to pay income tax, was perhaps the only severely taxed man in the country. He paid the rates, the tea, sugar, tobacco, malt, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... entitled to assume over the conquests of his fathers. The first Caesars had scrupulously guarded the distinction of ingenuous and servile birth, which was decided by the condition of the mother. The slaves who were liberated by a generous master immediately entered into the middle class of libertini or freedmen; but they could never be enfranchised from the duties of obedience and gratitude; whatever were the fruits of their industry, their patron and his family inherited the third part, or even the whole of their fortune, ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... French friend calls it. A few days after the assassination of the Chief of Police in Moscow I was received by his successor in the same place where the assassination had occurred. He did not take the slightest precaution with me, whom he did not know at all, nor with men of the middle class who came to present their petitions, in spite of the fact that it was under precisely identical conditions that his predecessor had been slain. Before I left I looked over to where on the floor ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter into ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... easy enough to ignore them," answered her cousin Cora, "and I shall do it with a vengeance. It is one thing to be nice and friendly with shopgirls and factory hands, and quite another to take up with the well-to-do middle class. Give them an inch and they'll take an ell every time. First thing you know they'll turn round and ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... say—just as they do in everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry, and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the rest? We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We're all right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this generation of the nation's life—a misfortune which is being rapidly repaired—is that she has no middle class: and no class with any "tradition" of leadership behind it. There are the peasants—admirable material for nation-making—heroic, thrifty, moral, industrious, practical. Above the peasants there is ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... the conditions mentioned, on the fourth of March, 1861, entered upon the duties of the great office to which he had been chosen. He came from the common walks of life—from what, in other countries, would be called the great middle class. His early home was one of the humblest, where he was a stranger to the luxuries and to many of the ordinary comforts of life. His opportunities for education were only such as were common in the remote habitations of our Western ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... ended with a despairing appeal to the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he regarded as incurably vulgar. The middle classes are apt to receive hard measure; they have few friends and many critics. We must go back to Euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of the community and "the salvation of the State"; but it is, on the whole, true. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... us now," he cried, "us others, the Reds? Ah, yes, it's all very well for your middle class to preach moderation. I could do it, too. You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot. But how about US?" he vociferated. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the middle class were usually dressed in hard wearing, rough clothes made of homespun material, with a slightly better (and perhaps more colorful) costume for Sunday and holiday wear. In 1622 each Englishman who planned to emigrate to Jamestown was advised to ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... use. As we all walked towards one of the more private entrances of the Park, I had an opportunity of observing the people we had served. They were very respectable in appearance; but I knew enough of the world to see that they belonged to what is called the middle class in England. I thought the man might be a soldier; while the two females had an air of great respectability, though not in the least of fashion. The girl appeared to be nearly as old as myself, and was decidedly ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... birth of secular learning, not a revival of clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles, secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin of ecclesiastical ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... passed away from the aristocracy and the privileged ranks to the middle and lower middle classes. The Conservative party were looking eagerly out for young men of promise to stiffen their ranks in the new parliament, the first elected under the Reform Bill, the first which the middle class had their due share in creating; the first in which such cities as Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham were allowed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... those who complained of "The Marriage of Figaro" on that account really found in it was, that it satirized classes and institutions which could not bear such attacks, and had not been used to them. Moliere had ridiculed the lower middle class; the newly rich; the tradesman who, because he had made a fortune, thought himself a gentleman; but, as one whose father was in the employ of royalty, he laid no hand on any pillar of the throne. But ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... market-place a country Moor of the middle class is in charge of four young boy slaves, and is telling a friend what he paid for them. I learn that their price averaged eleven pounds apiece in English currency—two hundred and eighty dollars altogether in Moorish money, that they were all bred in Marrakesh ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... Coleridge, and Tennyson, in literature. Lord Hardinge, Colonel Edwardes, and Major Hodson, so honourably known in Indian warfare, were also the sons of clergymen. Indeed, the empire of England in India was won and held chiefly by men of the middle class—such as Clive, Warren Hastings, and their successors—men for the most part bred in factories and trained to habits ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... rapidly, "The Clarion" and "Labor Advocate," the two organs of the Independent Labor Party, helping wonderfully in the work. In 1883 the Fabian Society, an organization Socialistic in name and tendencies, was founded by a group of middle class students. It rejected the Marxian economies, and by means of lectures, pamphlets, and books advocated practical measures of social reform. Among the leading English Socialists of the more radical type have been Hyndman, Aveling, Blatchford, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... subordination which ought to be maintained and enforced. Non-commissioned officers were the principal actors in this department, and being connected by the ties of common interest, they formed a combination which interfered with the middle class of inhabitants, since they could get on board any vessels on account of their rank, which gave them the privilege of doing so, without being under the necessity of obtaining a written pass for that purpose. The principle ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... find in people whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking, healthy children. Nothing could be more ordinary. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... has come over the domestic habits of the French middle class. This means that the money that would have been accumulated for the girl's diary is now in some cases diverted into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... was the danger of being frightened by the scare, which the noisy spreading of certain subversive doctrines has lately caused, into a purely negative and defensive attitude; of ceasing to be, as it has been, a popular and progressive party, and becoming merely the embodiment of upper and middle class prejudices and alarms. I do not say that there are not many projects in the air which are calculated to excite alarm, but they can only be successfully resisted on frankly democratic and popular lines. My own feeling is—I may be quite wrong, but I state my opinion for ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... main subject. If the Peasant Wars are revolutionary only in imagination, what was really and truly revolutionary at that time was the advance in manufacturing—the production of the middle class, the constantly developing division of labor, and the resulting wealth in capital, which accumulated exclusively in the hands of the middle class because it was just this class that devoted itself to production ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... city of Rome at the beginning of the Augustan age was not less than half a million of people, and probably exceeded this number. There was no middle class, a comparatively small number of gentry, a very numerous plebs or populace, and many slaves. The Emperor Augustus boasted that after the war with Sextus Pompeius he handed over 30,000 slaves, who had been serving with the enemy, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the kingdom of Poland, vanished before the nineteenth century began. Destitute of a strong central government, the scene of continual anarchy among the turbulent nobles, possessing no national frontiers and no national middle class, its population being made up of nobles, serfs, and foreigners, it lay at the mercy of the ambitious surrounding kingdoms, by which it was finally absorbed. On three successive occasions was the territory of the feeble nation divided between its foes, the first partition ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... not young; solitary, sensitive, and although they did not know it, proud. They both belonged to what is called the Middle Class, and there was this further resemblance between them that they each descended from families which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century, and had gradually sunken in fortune. In both houses ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... candor of the laws was satisfied, if her freedom could be ascertained, during a single moment, between the conception and the delivery. The slaves, who were liberated by a generous master, immediately entered into the middle class of libertines or freedmen; but they could never be enfranchised from the duties of obedience and gratitude; whatever were the fruits of their industry, their patron and his family inherited the third part; or even the whole of their fortune, if ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... suffer and starve; but who, if by any little saving of a better time they can manage just to buy bread, shall be precisely where they were, practically, when the storm shall have blown over. Between these lies the great middle class—among whom, as on the middle ground, the world's great battle is continually waging—of persons who are neither rich nor poor; who have neither secured fortunes to fall back upon, nor yet the independence of their hands to turn to, when business and its income fail. This is the ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... leader was discharged from the hospital, he found that his organization had been made illegal, and he himself exiled. Rodriguez went to El Paso, Texas, and immediately, working through Escobar, set about establishing the "Confederation of the Middle Class" to take over now the illegal Gold Shirt work and consolidate the various Mexican fascist groups. Its headquarters was established at 40 Passo de ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, appearing generally ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... theory," I said, "is that the people who still have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least. Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it. Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed. His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle class, practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contadino and his padrone. This ancient order, quietness, and beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the barriera: and this is a charm in Florence, for you may so easily look on her from afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, of sadness, of regret: she has lost her soul ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... our critic: 'Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class,' and he remained so through ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the best land should yield to the owner a revenue of five bags of rice per annum; each of these bags holds four to (a to is rather less than half an imperial bushel), and is worth at present (1868) three riyos, or about sixteen shillings; land of the middle class should yield a revenue of three or four bags. The rent is paid either in rice or in money, according to the actual price of the grain, which varies considerably. It is due in the eleventh month of the year, when the crops have all been gathered, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in their manner - which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle class - serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now arriving, quite a hiveful of busy bees, all eager to start on their work. The confusion which so often arose was, in fact, increased by the excessive number of nurses, women of the aristocracy and upper-middle class, with whose fervent zeal some little vanity was blended. There were more than two hundred of them, and as each had to make a donation on joining the Hospitality of Our Lady of Salvation, the managers did not dare to refuse any applicants, for fear lest they might check the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... The public is recruited from the upper, the middle, and the lower class. That the recruits come mostly from the lower class is because the lower class is still the least well-educated. That they come in as high proportion from the middle class as from the less well-educated upper class, is because the 'young Barbarians,' reared in a more gracious environment, often acquire a grace of mind which serves them as well as would mental keenness.) Whereas in the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... an inquest was held by Mr. Michael Fullam, Coroner, at Aughaward, near Ballinale in this County, on the body of a respectable middle class farmer named James Prunty. It appears the deceased, a feeble old man of 76 years of age, went into an out-house occupied by his own bull for the purpose of cleaning it out, and while in the act of doing so, the bull broke its chain and turned ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... deceive myself," Carl said frankly. "I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class." ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural influence which his works betray. Reared in a slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry—young Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... laborers to do the wood-carving. When I think of how much less in money and in trouble make a place far more magnificent in California, I wonder our people have not lovelier places. Of course, the difference is that in Virginia there were just three classes of people—the aristocrat, the middle class, and the negroes. The aristocracy had the land, the middle class were the artisans, and the negroes the slaves. The only ones who had fine houses were the aristocracy, whereas with us the great mass of our people are business and professional men of comparatively small means ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... concentrated with fewer and fewer men, while history has taken the opposite turn and has distributed the shares of the industrial companies into hundreds of thousands of hands. Other prophecies foretold the end of the small farmer, still others the uprooting of the middle class, others gave the date for the great crash; and everything would have come out exactly as the prophets foresaw it, if they had not forgotten to consider many other factors in the social situation which gave to the events ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities, and especially at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan college; their civil magistrates were also in great ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... more accentuated by the absence both of other European peoples and of a definite middle class of any race. Everywhere in the areas tenanted originally by Spaniards and Portuguese the European of alien stock was unwelcome, even though he obtained a grudging permission from the home governments to remain a colonist. In Brazil, owing to the close ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... stout-hearted men (chiefly machine-gunners), who could be depended on to fight to the last; men who did not intend to fight, and did intend to put up their hands on the first occasion; and, thirdly, the 'great middle class,' who were prepared to do their duty, and had a sense of discipline, but who could not be classed as heroes.... It was they who came to consider that when tanks arrived, 'there was ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Runciman. The work was, indeed, not an easy one for which to find a competent workman. It needed a writer sufficiently well educated to answer a wide range of questions on the most varied topics, yet sufficiently acquainted with the habits, ideas, and social codes of the lower middle class and the labouring people to throw himself readily into their point of view on endless matters of life and conduct. Above all, it needed a man who could sympathise genuinely with the simplest of his fellows. The love troubles of housemaids, the perplexities as to etiquette, or as to practical life ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... phantoms of an airy unreality from the bottomless abyss of his own so-called consciousness. Fortunately for humanity, the low-class unimaginative mind predominates in the world, as far as numbers are concerned; and there are enough true intellects among men to leaven the whole. The middle class of mind is a small class, congregated together chiefly within the boundaries of a very amusing institution calling itself "society." These people have scraped and varnished the aforesaid composition of imagination, ignorance, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... passionate resentment was accordingly roused in her otherwise tranquil disposition. It was not surprising that this resentment increased as the years went on, and manifested itself in a manner characteristic of a girl sprung from the lower middle class, in whom mere superficial polish had taken the place of any true culture. The real torment of our subsequent life together lay in the fact that, owing to her violence, I had lost the last support I had hitherto found in her exceptionally sweet disposition. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for the picture, and ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... if she could become articulate, might tell us something of the life of the average girl to-day. Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society. Meenachi's father is a weaver of the far-famed Madura muslins with their gold thread border. Her earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers' street where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind trees ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... numbering at a rough estimate from ten to twelve millions. It is almost purely agricultural in its habits, and divided into great classes as in civilized countries. There is a territorial nobility, a considerable middle class, formed principally of merchants, officers of the army, etc.; but the great bulk of the people are well-to-do peasants who live upon the lands of the lords, from whom they hold under a species of feudal tenure. The best bred people in the country are, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... came to a better sort of house. That might be it. He would take the chance. There was a man of the middle class, and two or three women, standing at ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... was marked by a strong reaction toward romanticism. The feudal system with its many imperfections had become a memory, and had been idealized by the people. The nation felt pride in its new aristocracy, sprung largely from the middle class, and based rather on worth than ancestry. The bitterness of the Wars of the Roses was forgotten, and was succeeded by an era of reconciliation and good feeling. England was united in a heroic queen whom all sects, ranks, and parties idolized. The whole country exulting in its new ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... proceedings and expressing their opinion as to whether their association should pass under the control of men entirely unconnected with the Craft. But no, the leaders of the new movement all appear to have belonged to the middle class, nor from this moment do either masons or architects seem to have played ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... genius took afterwards most delight in. Of course there are inequalities in it, and some things that would have been better away; but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in its descriptions of the old city with which its writer was so familiar. It was a picture ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... consists of the high born animals, the middle class and the low down, common herd, and when you go among the animals as strangers you are received just as you would be in society. If you are properly introduced to the elephants by the elephant keeper, who vouches for ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... markets and better able from their superior value, compared with their bulk, to pay the cost of transport by land. Then, and not till then, can we expect to see these territories pay a considerable net surplus revenue to Government, and abound in a middle class of merchants, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... rough but very generous, stern both against Popery and Puritanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new influence. He was the apostle of the Church to the great middle class. ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... all that can intoxicate—is here about twenty years behind its present position in the United States. I think there are not more absolute drunkards here than in our American cities, but the habit of drinking for drink's sake is all but universal. The Aristocracy drink almost to a man; so do the Middle Class; so do the Clergy; so alas! do the Women! There is less of Ardent Spirits imbibed than with us; but Wines are much cheaper and in very general use among the well-off; while the consumption of Ale, Beer, Porter, &c. (mainly by the Poor) is enormous. Only think of L5,000,000 or Twenty-Five Millions ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... strict confidence, that they reveal to us urgent pressure on the part of the emperor to induce England to intervene with France in our sad war. The English cabinet, most fortunately, is not unanimously hostile, and Lord John Russell is hesitating. Our friends are the queen and the great middle class of dissenters, and, strange to say, the Lancashire operatives. The aristocracy, the church, finance, and literature are all our enemies, and at home, you know, things are not altogether as one could wish. Just now no general, ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... excellent portraits of such men are given. The best is that of George Drafton, in In Her Earliest Youth. In no other novel are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The author's knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... listless society! I very much wish that a lady like you would make a beginning, and would give up this exclusiveness, which cannot be maintained in these days, and would enrich our circle with the charming daughters of middle class families." ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... when they found themselves in responsible "posts." To adhere to the policy of Revolutionary Socialism meant, under those circumstances, to break with the bourgeoisie, their own and that of the Allies. And we have already said that the political helplessness of the intellectual and semi-intellectual middle class sought shelter for itself in a union with bourgeois liberalism. This caused the pitiful and truly shameful attitude of the middle-class leaders towards the war. They confined themselves to sighs, phrases, secret exhortations or appeals addressed ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... disorderly, uninviting—after a day's hard work. Glorious independence! No wonder that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their independence behind the counter, or at the sewing or typewriting machine. They are just as ready to marry as girls of middle class people who long to throw off the yoke of parental dependence. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised independence ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... shopping appears to be part of the holiday which is being made the most of. Surely, all the neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats, hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes; there must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied by older persons—seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of pleasure, waste no time ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of his life in a spot which, however beautiful, was still but a beautiful seclusion. We must keep in mind the different constitution of society in Russia, and particularly the fact, that the absence (at least for social purposes) of a middle class in that country, renders the upper ranks the only section of the social system in which intellectual pleasure can be sought, or intellectual supremacy appreciated. Pushkin himself always attached no inconsiderable importance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... of his professional skill, and the boudoir, where Germaine was entertaining envious young friends who came to see her wedding presents. The friends of Germaine were always a little ill at ease in the society of the Duke, belonging as they did to that wealthy middle class which has made France what she is. His indifference to the doings of the old friends of his family saddened them; and they were unable to understand his airy and persistent trifling. It seemed to them a discord in the ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... no doubt, in fact, that an independent, respectable, and, I believe, trustworthy middle class is rapidly forming.... If the real object of emancipation was to place the freedman in such a position that he might work out his own advancement in the social scale, and prove his capacity for the full and rational enjoyment of personal independence, secured by constitutional liberty, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... society. It is a cheap sneer, which speaks perpetually of the hollowness of so-called society, as if rich people could not make and did not make as honest friendships as the poor and middle class; but, at the same time, few would deny how much of what would be such a good thing is disfigured by display and insincerity, that miserable attempting to be thought richer than we are, that pitiable struggle to get into a smarter set than happens to be ours, the unreal compliments, ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... phrase, that the minister of the day sent to him often for the important information which the cabinet could not itself command. Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who comprehended the rising importance of the middle class; and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against "the Great Revolution families." Of his qualities in council we have no record; there is reason to believe that his administrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove that, if not supreme, he was eminent, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli |
